This interview was conducted at the
"World Conference of Planetary Violence in Human History, January
3-5, 1997."

Maxwell: It is an honor to be
here in your company Mr. Sitchin. For many years I've enjoyed
following your work in the field of ancient theology. My first
question is about the word
Yahweh, one of the names of God in
Hebrew. Is it a proper name or is Yahweh, in Hebrew, describing
something?Sitchin: It is a descriptive term. It is not a proper name.

Maxwell: That is what I thought. Could you explain exactly what
it is describing?Sitchin: It is usually translated "I am who I am" — something
like that. More accurately the tense, which in Hebrew it says
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, is a future tense. Therefore it means "I will
be whoever I will be," in context of the whole biblical tale and
with a throwback to the Sumerian information that I provide in
my books. It really means "I can be whoever I choose to be."

Maxwell: There was a professor I heard once talking about
Yahweh
and he said it also implied stored power that when it is
released it has something to do with the creative power being
released. Does that track with your understanding?

Sitchin: There must be one power — to use the term that you
mentioned from that professor — one power, one creator, one God,
whatever we mean by that, who created everything. He not only
created, in my opinion, but even determined the course of events
from beginning to end, and not only faiths like ours, but at the
end of my book Divine Encounters I give a translation of a
Hebrew prayer which is called Lord of the Universe, which
clearly says this concept of Lord of the Universe, not of this
solar system, not of the planet, was there before anything began
and will be there after everything ends.

How does this fit in
with the Sumerian tales of
Anunnaki who came here from another
planet in our solar system? How does it dovetail with the tales
of the Bible? It dovetails by saying that this entity, whether
it has a shape or a form, I do not know, acts through
emissaries. This is the meaning, as I understand and expound it
in the last chapter in the book, this is the meaning of what God
answered Moses. He says,

"I can be whoever I want to be. So I can
be and live, I can be Enki, because they are only my
emissaries."

This, I think, is the truth of what we have to
understand from the Bible.

Maxwell: I attended a lecture once with a Lee and Vivian
Gladden, who I think I have mentioned before to you in passing.
They wrote a book about the same subject, it was called Heirs of
the Gods where they talked about the celestials or the
extraterrestrials and they made the point that there were only
two scriptures in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, where
the word "God" implied a divine overshadowing, creative force of
all creation, as opposed to all the other places, except those
two, that talked about Elohim, which was different from the
word.

Sitchin:Gods with a small "g." This must be understood. These
are gods with a small "g" who in turn were the emissaries of
God
with a capital "G." And in the New Testament on which I am not
as expert as on the Old Testament, but even there, there is the
statement that "I am Alpha and I am Omega, I am the first and I
am the last, I am the beginning and I am the end," which is
exactly what the Hebrew phrase states.

Maxwell: There were so many questions in relation to that but I
am very interested in the "sons of God" also. Were the Elohim
the "sons" of the sons of God, or were the Elohim the "sons of
God?"Sitchin: They were the Anunnaki. And it is their sons born on
earth who married the daughters of Adam.

Maxwell: We can say then that the Elohim were the ones that in
the Hebrew were referred to as the Sons of God?Sitchin: No. The Elohim are what the Sumerians called
the Anunnaki, "those who from heaven to earth came." They are
Elohim
in the Bible. Indeed, when you encounter this term and most in
connection with the so-called pagan gods, that are also called
Elohim in the Bible, indeed, at some point Joshua gives the
Israelites, before they cross the Jordan into the Promised Land,
he says, "You now have a choice, make up your mind, do you want
to follow the Elohim of Egypt, or do you want to follow
the Elohim of Mesopotamia, or do you want to follow Yahweh?" — the
monotheistic concept of one God that rules, controls, designs,
etc., everything.

Maxwell: The prophet Daniel in the Old Testament, I think it is
Daniel 4:23, reminded me of Genesis 1:2 where it says that God,
or Elohim, created the heavens and the Earth, and the Earth.Sitchin: I raise my hand to tell you that indirectly you raise a
very, very fundamental question for biblical scholars and for
theologians. In Hebrew the sentence, the verse says, "b’reysheet,"
which is translated "In the beginning," Elohim,
God, "created
the heavens and the Earth." Many, many theologians for
generations, it even goes back to Talmudic times, the time of
Second Temple, asked how could it be that the story of creation,
of beginning, starts with the second letter of the alphabet, the
bet, the beta, "B," and not with the first letter of the
alphabet, the aleph, the alpha. It just beats logic. It beats
your beliefs.

What I show in my book, the latest one, Divine Encounters, is
that if you add the aleph, which may have dropped somewhere
along the rewritings, etc. of the Bible, it becomes not b’reysheet, but
ab reysheet, the "Father of beginning created
Elohim, the heavens and the earth." So the supreme creator
created
the Anunnaki or Elohim, the heavens and the earth.

Maxwell: And that is a whole different story than is usually
presented.Sitchin: If you add the aleph, you give a whole new dimension to
this first sentence of the first book of the Bible.

Maxwell: I have always felt that there was most likely another
ancient civilization even before. This is my own conjecture. Sitchin: Definitely. You are absolutely right on that because
even according to the Sumerian tales in many texts and
especially the so-called king lists that deal with the cities,
pre- or antediluvial cities and with the ten antediluvian rulers
which some compared to the ten patriarchs of the Bible before
the deluge. And there were cities, there was a civilization that
the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal boasted that he could read
tablets from before the flood. All the indications are that they
recognized, referred to and accepted this fact that there was a
civilization of the gods because those cities, prediluvial are
spoken of as cities of the gods.

After the deluge there came cities of men with the help of the Anunnaki. So there was a time of a, let us call it a divine
civilization, a divine culture. As I am sure you know, in the
Egyptian beliefs the priest Manetho who paralleled the Chaldean
Berosus, they lived more or less at the same time. The heirs of
Alexander in what became eventually the Byzantine, hired a
Babylonian priest to write the history of the world based upon
the Mesopotamian. Ptolemys in Egypt hired the Egyptian priest
Manetho to do the same, but the versions are very similar. Both
spoke by the way, of a series of calamities that preceded the
deluge. It is not clear at what intervals.

Maxwell: About 20 years ago I talked with the President of the
American Rabbinical Association who was a good friend of mine. I
asked him about Genesis 9:1 where, after the flood of Noah, God
says to Noah to go forth with his sons and their wives and go
forth and multiply and "re-plenish" the earth. "Re-" obviously
means do again. Yes, that is understood to redo the earth
because God had destroyed so much of the life. Then again, if
you go back to Genesis 1:28 where God creates Adam and Eve and
he is telling the original couple to go forth, reproduce and re-plenish
the earth. To do it again.Sitchin: No. The word "again" does not appear there. It says "pru
ravu malua al-aretz," — "be fruitful," in terms of offspring, "ravu,"
multiply, and fill the earth.

Maxwell: But it did not have replenish?Sitchin: No. In the original not regarding Adam. That is one of
the dangers of translations. The translators really interpret.

Maxwell: There are so many questions that I have wanted to ask
in relation to the word El. Was El in fact a Hebrew word as
such, or was El existing before the Hebrew language?Sitchin:El is the Hebrew. Hebrew stems from Akkadian. All
Semitic languages stem from Akkadian — Canaanite, Phoenician,
Babylonian, Assyrian, Moabite — stem from the Akkadian which was
the language that came after the demise of the Sumerian
civilization. When I read an Assyrian text it is almost like
Hebrew. Not exactly: there are dialects and so on. So the Hebrew
word El which is usually translated God, or divine being, really
is from the Akkadian Ilu and it meant literally "the lofty one."
So if you want to be very precise you have to translate whenever
it says El, you have to say "the lofty one."

Maxwell: I am so very appreciative of your time, but I really
have to ask you something that is important to me. In my
particular work in examining the occult or hidden symbolism in
our modern-day religious and political movements, I became
fascinated about 20 years ago with the symbol of the Sun as it
is used by the secret societies, the fraternal orders and
especially in our political and religious symbolism today. It
was fascinating to me that the Sun, when you brought up is that
what we are talking about, or David Talbott talked about the Sun
being Saturn. But the Sun has been used, and that sun symbol
with the winged Sun, you brought out, is the symbol of the
Anunnaki?

Sitchin: It is the symbol of Nibiru, of the so-called
Twelfth
Planet. As I showed you, on these monuments and I could show you
on Egyptian monuments, and Hittite monuments, this was the
symbol connected with the king, the priesthood with their gods.
That was the symbol of the planet. As I showed on the same
monument that gives the 12 members of the solar system, you
definitely see the Sun with its rays totally separate, and the
symbol of what is called the Winged Disk.

Maxwell: You see them simultaneously together.Sitchin: On the same depictions which are repeated and repeated.
You see Earth as the seventh planet. In many instances you see
Venus as the eighth planet with eight rays. You see Mars as the
sixth planet with six rays. Everything corroborates what I have
written.

In Sumerian times and with the ensuing Babylonian-Assyrian eras,
the Sun-god, Utu in Sumerian Shamashin, Hebrew, and all the
other languages, was not the significant deity at all in the
hierarchy. The Shamash, according to the Sumerian, and therefore
further on, believed by the Assyrians, Babylonians and others,
was the son of the god that in Akkadian is called Sîn and he was
the moon god. According to these hierarchies Shamash was the son
of the moon god. Not so when it came to Nibiru. The ruler of
Nibiru stood at the head of the pantheon. So the pantheon had to
do with Anunnaki, from where they came, and the ruler there was
the head and his symbol was the winged disk.

Maxwell: In my collection I have about five works, two of them
are doctoral theses, and others are extended articles appearing
in the Middle East, on the word "chief cornerstone." I picked up
on that. It was a fascinating study where the word chief
cornerstone is translated from the Hebrew when it appears in
Hebrew in Psalms 118:22 where Messiah is referred to as the
chief cornerstone. While in the Christian Greek scriptures of
the New Testament, the Messiah or Jesus is referred to twice as
the chief cornerstone. That word chief cornerstone, what does it
actually imply for the Messiah in both Psalms and in the New
Testament?

Sitchin: It is not cornerstone, in other words, when you lay the
foundation it is the cornerstone. It is the apex-stone, "rosh
phena," the head where the sides meet, as in a pyramid. The
apexstone, the topstone, the one that is really the conduit to
the heavens.

Maxwell: That is what these articles were saying. Every one was
saying it was the pinnacle.Sitchin: Pinnacle, but not foundation stone on the ground.

Maxwell: Remember, even in the New Testament when Satan takes
Jesus to the temple to tempt him, the Scripture says he takes
him up to the pinnacle of the temple, to the point of the
temple. I am totally sure that there is a lot of symbolism that
the early writers—Sitchin: I think we should rewrite the Bible, in English, not in
Hebrew.

Maxwell: That is very important.Sitchin: That is what I am thinking about, a new translation
based on my understanding of it.

Maxwell: I think that would be absolutely important for so many
people in the Western World to get a better grasp of the
symbolism, the implications of the original words, where they
came from and just get a new understanding from where all of
this came.Sitchin: With your help, it may come to be.

Maxwell: I would love to do that. This planet
Nibiru. Is there
anything I can have you say concerning the return of Nibiru that
you.Sitchin: Not yet. But I promise you another interview when I can
speak about it.

Maxwell: Let me again say that it is not only a pleasure but an
honor to be with you and I do very much appreciate your time.Sitchin: It is always a pleasure to be interviewed by someone
who knows almost as much as I do. I leave a little for myself.